Running a blog, or, indeed, running a website of any kind, is a very time-consuming exercise. So it’s understandable that one would want to make as much money as possible from it. With that in mind, it’s quite common to see people struggle with what sort of money-raising tactics to use.

For a lot of people, the first thing you need to do is pretty clear: you need to get more visitors. If you don’t have the visitors, then you’re not going to get many companies or individuals willing to advertize in some capacity on your website. So the need for good marketing comes very clear. Of course, precisely how you should market your blog, unfortunately, isn’t quite as clear as that!

When you’re looking to make some profit from your blog, it’s understandable that you’d want to minimize the amount you need to spend on marketing. This means you’ll want to know which marketing technique is going to give you the most bang for your buck. And if we’re talking about marketing techniques, then we’ll inevitably have to get to the subject of PPC and SEO.

There are a lot of people out there who would unequivocally champion one over the other. SEO is seen to lean more toward “natural” clicks, because these tactics result in a more organic appearance on search engines. PPC are characterized as “paid” clicks – which isn’t an unfair characterization, especially considering “PPC” stands for “pay per click!” But when the terms “natural” and “paid” are thrown against one another, there seems to be a more positive bias towards the former.

SEO is, of course, absolutely necessary. Plenty of “hip” naysayers will try to tell you otherwise.They seem to forget that, in the online world, websites like Google pretty much run the show. (And unless Google collapses within the next few years, their influence is only going to increase exponentially.) So you shouldn’t be trying to go without SEO.

But PPC is still the most popular form of online marketing, and there are very good reasons for this. The fact is that PPC can really help you when it comes to going up against much bigger companies. This doesn’t mean you should be pouring millions into a PPC campaign just to get to number one! A modestly-funded PPC campaign has been shown to improve the visibility of small businesses when done correctly. It all depends on how it’s managed. So an important question arises about PPC management: do you really need it? This will help you decide!

It’s not as if you have to choose SEO or PPC, though. And this is a very common and damning misconception in the world of online business. There’s this idea that the two can’t really work together very well, that they’ll conflict with each other in ways that damage your overall visibility. But this simply isn’t true. In fact, the two can actually be used together in ways that benefit both! Knowing how SEO and PPC can interact is very important if you’re going to use both.